Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom may be suing server hosting company Leaseweb over a “data massacre." The Dutch company says it deleted files from 630 servers due to lack of interest in them, but Dotcom has revealed letters proving otherwise.

The revelation comes a week after Dotcom accused the US government and Leaseweb of deleting millions of personal files without warning, including “petabytes of pictures, backups, personal & business property.”

Most of the permanently deleted data came from European users, with servers then re-provisioned to other customers – despite the fact that Megaupload had specifically requested that the hosting provider preserve the information.

“They deleted petabytes of data in the face of Megaupload’s data preservation notices. Our legal team asked them multiple times not to delete the data while the US court is deciding the pending cases including the rights of our users,” TorrentFreak quoted Dotcom as saying.

But Leaseweb’s senior regulatory counsel, Alex de Joode, said his company deleted the data and re-provisioned the servers “after a year of nobody showing any interest” in them.

“We did inform Megaupload about our decision to re-provision the servers,” de Joode said in a June 19 statement, thus disputing Dotcom’s accusation that the decision was made "without warning.” De Joode said that Leaseweb received no answer from the Megaupload team, so they “commenced the re-provisioning of the servers in February 2013.”

“To minimize security risks and maximize the privacy of our clients, it is a standard procedure at Leaseweb to completely clean servers before they are offered to any new customer,” he said.

To back up his accusations, Kim Dotcom has published an email which was sent from Megaupload’s legal counsel to Leaseweb in March 2012. The letter allegedly shows that Megaupload did, in fact, request preservation of the files.

"Megaupload continues to request that Leaseweb preserve any and all information, documentation and data related to Megaupload - as destruction by Leaseweb would appear to be in violation of amongst other things the applicable civil litigation data preservation rules and would interfere with evidence in a criminal matter [...]," said the letter. The email is signed by Megaupload lawyer Ira Rothken and addressed to Leaseweb’s A.H. Bram de Haas van Dorsser.

The email adds that “the Mega data on the servers at Leaseweb contain private and sensitive customer data and is subject to applicable privacy and data retention laws.”

“Megaupload is negotiating with the United States to discern feasibility of consumer data access and the conditions for the same," Rothken wrote in the letter. 

 The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) representing the file-sharing website in court made a similar request to Leaseweb USA in April.

“We now write to formally request that you preserve that material both for purposes of contemplated future litigation and as a matter of obligation and courtesy to the innocent individuals whose materials have unfortunately been swept up into this case,” the EFF letter reads.

According to Dotcom, Megaupload’s legal team is analyzing whether Leaseweb violated the law.

“I can tell you that we are contemplating legal action against Leaseweb,” he told TorrentFreak on Wednesday.

“We believe that Leaseweb acted inappropriately under the circumstances when they destroyed data,” Rothken told the blogging website. “Ultimately we blame the United States who exercised constructive control over Megaupload’s assets and who had the obligation, resources, and ability to preserve all relevant and exonerating evidence including the data located at Leaseweb and failed to do so,” he added.

But Leaseweb claims it done nothing wrong. In a June 26 statement, the company stressed that “the contract between Leaseweb B.V. and Megaupload was governed by Dutch law.”

“This means the termination, and subsequent data retention needs to be valid under Dutch law. As there was no claim from the Dutch authorities on the data, the data was not subject to evidence rules. Also Dutch and European Privacy legislation prohibit giving third parties (i.e. MegaUpload customers, or Instra) direct access to their data,” the statement read.

Dotcom, who made a fortune from his file-sharing service Megaupload, is currently under a federal investigation, launched by the US Department of Justice after police raided his home. He is currently free on bail in New Zealand, with an extradition trial set for August.

The US has charged the Megaupload founder with facilitating copyright fraud on a massive scale, racketeering, and money-laundering, which carries maximum sentence of 20 years in jail.

Authorities claim Megaupload has cost copyright holders upwards of $500 million in lost revenues, due to content being illegally uploaded to its servers. The Department of Justice also believes Dotcom illegally earned $175 million by selling ads and subscriptions on the site.

On the anniversary of his arrest last January, Dotcom launched a new file-hosting site called ‘Mega.’

 NASA is launching IRIS, a revolutionary telescope that could finally explain a phenomenon that has been puzzling physicists for decades: why the Sun’s atmosphere is hotter than its surface. It may also give a clue about how other stars spread their heat.

IRIS, short for Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph – a 7-foot ultraviolet telescope that cost over $100 million – will be launched not from the ground, but from a high altitude. A specially modified plane will take off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, before reaching a height of about 13,000 meters and dropping the Pegasus XL rocket – used on tens of missions since 1994 - which will propel the payload into the atmosphere at an estimated 2:27 GMT on Friday morning.

Once in the atmosphere, four identical cameras will try to rapidly capture light changes in the chromosphere – the 2,000 km deep area between the sun’s surface and outer atmosphere – which will then be processed into 3-D heat movement maps by super-computers on the ground.
At any one point they will focus in detail on just 1 percent of the Sun’s surface – rather than the entire body, as have most existing observation telescopes.

“IRIS will show the solar chromosphere in more detail than has ever been observed before,” declared Adrian Daw, deputy project scientist. “My opinion is that we are bound to see something we didn’t expect to see.”

The prime question is – what is the physical process by which the surface of the sun is about 5,700 degrees Celsius, while the corona, the outer layer of the atmosphere, which stretches over millions of miles, is more than 1,000,000 million degrees Celsius (and can heat up to ten times that).

“Usually, the closer you get to a heat source, such as a fire, the hotter it gets, but the solar atmosphere doesn’t do that. The solar atmosphere gets hotter as it gets further away from the Sun, and scientists don’t yet have enough information to distinguish between various theories on why this happens,” said NASA in a pre-mission statement.

"What we want to discover is what the basic physical processes are that transfer energy and material from the surface of the sun out to the outer atmosphere, to the corona," said IRIS principal investigator Alan Title, a physicist at Lockheed Martin's Advanced Technology Center Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory in California.

There are two current theories explaining what has been termed the Coronal Heating Problem. One proposes that special sorts of waves travel from the hot core of the sun to the corona, where they dissipate, leaving heat. Another shows magnetic fields in the sun creating electric currents in the corona, which then violently “re-connect” lashing back onto the sun and releasing huge quantities of energy into the outer atmosphere.

“We don’t know whether any of these are right or whether we need new concepts. It’s the observations from IRIS that are going to be able to determine that,” said Eric Priest, a solar physicist at the University of Saint Andrews in Scotland.

The area under the lens is also the source of the ‘space weather’ our planetary system experiences. Solar flares and solar winds, which can have a wide variety of effects from damaging satellite equipment to causing blackouts on Earth (in fact an energy outage forced the IRIS launch to be postponed by a day), either originate in the chromosphere and the bottom of the corona, or are much affected by the little-known processes going on there.

Any discoveries will also help scientists understand how other very hot bodies in the universe behave.

“If we understand these structures properly on the Sun,” said Priest “we will predict how they scale in other structures in the universe.”

A revered Syrian monk and hermit, Father Franҫois Mourad, has been killed during an assault of the Franciscan monastery in a predominantly Christian village in the north near the Turkish border, Vatican Radio reported.

The circumstances surrounding Mourad’s death in the monastery of St. Anthony of Padua, about 70 miles from Syria’s largest city Aleppo, remain unclear.

It’s believed that Maroud was shot dead when tried to defend several religious sisters from the rebels when the monastery that gave them shelter was attacked and pillaged on June 23.

In a statement issued earlier this week the Prefect Cardinal Leonardo Sandri said that “this latest episode of unjustified violence, arouse the conscience of the leaders of the conflicting parties and the international community, so that, as repeatedly stated by the Holy Father Pope Francis, the guns of war be silenced and a season of justice and reconciliation begun for a future of peace.”

After the outbreak of the war in Syria, Father François left his hermitage to be with a friar in fragile health and to serve a neighboring community of religious sisters, Vatican Radio reported.

The head of the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land, Franciscan Father Pierbattista Pizzaballa, told Vatican Radio that Mourad was not a Franciscan, but had to take refuge in the convent after it became clear he was not safe at the Syriac Catholic hermitage that he was building nearby.

According to Father Pizzaballa, the Ghassanieh neighborhood "like other Christian villages, has been almost completely destroyed and is almost totally abandoned," adding that the only people left there were "the rebels with their families, rebels who are not from Syria and who are extremists."

"The only thing we can do, other than pray for Father Francois and all the victims, is pray that this folly ends soon and that no more weapons are sent to Syria because that would only prolong this absurd civil war," Father Pizzaballa suggested.

He described the current situation in Syria as a "battleground, and not just between Syrian forces, but also for other Arab countries and the international community. The ones paying the price are the poor, the small and the least, including the Christians," according to the Catholic News Service.

"The international community must put the brakes on this," he noted.

Syriac Catholic Archbishop Jacques Behnan Hindo of Hassake-Nisibi told Fides (the news agency of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples) that Father Mourad sent him “several messages which showed he was aware of living in a dangerous situation and was willing to offer his life for peace in Syria and the world."

Killings and abductions have become common in Syria as the country has been locked in a two-year internal conflict. In April, two Orthodox bishops were kidnapped when they returned to Aleppo from the Turkish border. Their driver was killed.

Syria's 10 percent Christian population is particularly vulnerable to such attacks, especially from the opposition groups, as they have remained largely neutral or supportive of the government.